International

Trump Likely to Block Release of Some JFK Files

13:10, Saturday, 21 October, 2017

Conspiracy theorists of the world, get ready for some bad news. Trump administration and other government officials say privately that President Donald Trump is almost certain to block the release of information from some of the thousands of classified files related to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy that are scheduled to be made public in less than a week by the National Archives.Administration officials would not identify what specific information related to Kennedy’s murder might be kept secret on Trump’s orders, though they acknowledged concern over classified documents held at the Archives that were created decades after the assassination—specifically, in the 1990s. The officials held out a slim possibility that the always-unpredictable Trump could decide at the last minute to release all the remaining JFK files held at the Archives—tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of pages of long-secret documents—but said it was highly unlikely, especially because of concern that documents from the 1990s might expose relatively recent American intelligence and law-enforcement operations. Some of those documents could be partially released, with some of the information blacked out, they said. A previously released, bare-bones index of nearly 3,100 never-before-seen assassination-related documents scheduled for release next week shows that the vast majority were created in the 1960s and 1970s, and many, if not most, of them appear likely to be declassified. Only several dozen date from the 1990s, and most of those were created by the CIA; many are letters written at the spy agency to a special federal review board that, at the time, was trying to decide how much of the JFK record from the 1960s could be made public without damaging national security or U.S. foreign policy.Lindsay Walters, a White House spokeswoman, told POLITICO Magazine that the White House was working “to ensure that the maximum amount of data can be released to the public” by next Thursday, Oct. 26—the 25-year deadline set by Congress under a 1992 law signed by President George H.W. Bush that was intended to try to tamp down conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination.